The End of New York

Life has had its hands full — with me and with the particular kind of chaos that descends when you’re preparing to uproot the last several years. I owe you a postcard.

New York and I were never a match made. That first year on the Upper East Side, fifth-floor walk-up, no air conditioning, no laundry, less than 300 square feet for two people and a cat— yeah, I’ll just stop there. I’ve heard “you die in your first year in New York,” and then you wake up reborn. I get them now. Though, fair to say that at the time, I just thought I was dying.

Brooklyn was the rebirth. (Of sorts).

We found our space here the way you find anything in this city: laboriously, defeatedly, and sweaty. We were seventeen apartment showings deep, both of us damp from late summer humidity and a genuine kind of hopelessness, at nine o’clock at night. And then we walked into a place that was an exhale. A backyard. The botanic garden within walking distance. Friends a bus ride away. A duplex with so much room that we actually had to buy more furniture — a sentence that still feels surreal to type.

That apartment held more than us. Dinner parties. More defeat. Career transitions. Sparkling Christmas trees. Brutal winter storms. My cat’s zoomies circuit. And two people, finally able to share a kitchen without choreographing around each other. (Kitchens are the most important room after all.)

I kept saying, over and over: if I could take this apartment with me, I would. Finally, a pocket of the city that felt like me.

When I arrived in New York, I had no idea what was in store. I didn’t know I’d end up in Brooklyn, or that I’d spend weekends dropping handwritten mail off to friends and bookending coffee shop dates with stationery store stops and one more little treat. I didn’t know what kind of people this city was going to hand me — or that it would hand me any at all.

That’s the funny thing about places. You think you’re choosing them for the practical reasons — the opportunity, the proximity, the rent you can almost afford. (Ok, nothing about moving to New York, or, living here, is practical.) But places have their own agenda. They shape you in detours. New York shaped me in ways I’m still uncovering. But its greatest act was the community it assembled around me, quietly, magically, and suddenly.

There was no blueprint. Just a phone call here, a neighborhood block party there, a dorm room door left open. The threads were so thin you could’ve missed them entirely. I didn’t. Or — and I think, perhaps, more than anything— they didn’t miss me.

In your twenties, friendships are in constant motion. They pause, they fracture, they fade into the particular silence of lives moving in different directions. I’ve had my fair share of that here too. But then, sometimes, they circle back. They reintroduce themselves. They expand into something you didn’t know you were missing until you were standing inside it.

Living here did that for me. It gathered people I’d loved in other chapters and pulled them, somehow, into the same orbit.

There’s the friend I met at seventeen on Parsons’ accepted students day — both of us fresh-faced and deciding, in that particular way you decide things at seventeen, that we were going to be roommates. Then I took a gap year. I made the call from Minneapolis, told her over the phone, and left space for the friendship to settle into something quieter, the way those almost-friendships do when life pulls you in different directions. It didn’t settle. It waited. Years later, in New York: finally. Coffee shops we’ve traveled around for together, long conversations about life in advertising (the commercial creative one works in after attaining a BFA) — she as a designer, me as a writer, both of us seeing the other’s world from the inside. I think about the two seventeen-year-olds who almost shared a dorm room and somehow found their way here anyway. Timing has a vision of its own. I couldn’t have asked for a friend who sees me as clearly as she does.

There’s the friend from freshman year in Chicago — we nearly had the same schedule, lived across from each other on the same dorm floor in the middle of downtown. Some nights, I’d knock on her door and she’d welcome me in with an extra bowl of dinner. We hauled groceries from Trader Joe’s around the L together, figuring out what city life was supposed to feel like when you’re still a teenager and slightly overwhelmed pretending not to be.

Then I moved. Years of different cities, different timelines. And then New York pulled us back into the same borough — her and her fiancé, me and mine, Sunday afternoons that felt like no time had passed at all. The kind of easy that only exists between people who knew you when.

There’s the friend who came to me through the most improbable chain of events I can think of. A weekend back home in Minnesota. A neighborhood get-together. A neighbor who’d heard from another neighbor that I lived on the Upper East Side, and who mentioned, almost in passing, that her daughter and boyfriend were moving there. Two blocks away, it turned out. We connected over coffee. And from there, countless coffees, dinners and Guinness sessions. She made the city feel warmer in the specific way that only another Minnesotan can — a shared shorthand, a familiar language, the quiet comfort of knowing there’s someone nearby who comes from the same kind of cold.

There are friends who made the city feel less daunting and confusing. Who showed me neighborhoods and places and art, who picked up my coffee order before I asked, who made me feel less like a fish out of water. The coffee shop owners across the street who I bake for, who became something more than neighbors, without us ever formally deciding to become friends.

This city gave me an eclectic, tender, brilliant group of people. Artists and thinkers and wanderers. People figuring things out. People who made New York — a place that never felt like mine — feel, in the end, like somewhere I will grieve leaving.

But, the price for love is grief.

And that’s a gift.

Places shape you. But people shape places. And the people New York handed me through a phone call, a Midwest neighborhood party, a dorm room door left open made it somewhere worth missing. And, somewhere worth returning.

“You see, I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May. [...] Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.”

Joan Didion

This Substack has always traveled out of wherever I was planted. The guides, the essays, the little dispatches — they’ve been shaped by New York as a home base, by the ease of hopping a train or catching a flight from JFK at some ungodly hour and arriving somewhere new by morning. For now, that’s changing. No trips on the calendar. No city to navigate by heart. No trains to miss or buses to run after. (Yet).

What’s ahead is something I’ve been searching for: solid ground. An anchor. The stillness of presence and staying there long enough to find out what that does.

I don’t know exactly what Send a Postcard looks like from a place that isn’t New York. I’m curious to find out.

The apartment stays in Brooklyn. These friends stay in my heart. The writing comes with.

More soon!

💌 R